Study Template: Online Grocery Ordering Feasibility Demonstration

This template will help you test the feasibility of online grocery ordering in research studies in your population and environment. ProofPilot has teamed up with Thrivemarket.com to make grocery credits part of any research study. Participants will be able to redeem those credits on Thrivemarket.com and have groceries delivered to their home or office. Thrivemarket.com sells healthy organic options, including dry goods, frozen meat, poultry and seafood, and packaged fruits and vegetables. Thrivemarket.com ships to any address in the contiguous United States. (Sorry AK, HI & PR).

Many organizations running services and programs may prefer to run a feasibility demonstration before any real research study. The template itself will provide some basic behavior change information. But, it’s purpose is more as a first step. Run this study to get a sense of how the logistics will work with your population, existing infrastructure, and services.

The opportunities grocery credits open to research studies are significant.

Test and evaluate the impacts of online grocery delivery to reduce food insecurity: Almost 13 million Americans are food insecure according to the USDA. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps help fill the gap for low-income Americans. But income is not the only barrier to healthy high-quality food for food insecure individuals. Lack of transportation, injury or illness can also be a significant barrier. With Thrivemarket.com grocery credits you can experiment with closing these gaps and examine long-term health and wellness outcomes.

Food as medicine studies: Use grocery credits within a clinical trial to test the short and long-term health impacts of healthy eating and specific food items.We know from a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 that lifestyle changes, including a better diet, are substantially more effective, for example, at preventing pre-diabetes from becoming diabetes than leading pharmaceuticals. There’s anecdotal information that cashews may be as effective as drugs in lowering cholesterol levels. Test these assumptions at scale with these grocery credits.

This template includes nearly $160 in credits from Thrivemarket.com for up to 25 participants. The credits are divided into four units over four weeks. The first includes a free annual membership to Thrivemarket (normally $60) and the first $25 credit. This membership can be used by the participant for orders beyond the grocery credits and supports free shipping for a year. Over the remaining three weeks, each week the participant receives $25. These credits will be presented via the ProofPilot Promo Code Functionality.

The study includes a modified 6 question food security questionnaire screener. Individuals who are food insecure, veterans, teachers or students are eligible to participate. You may add additional eligibility criteria.

Users will also be asked at the beginning and end of the study about their food behaviors via a small part of the annual CDC NHANES Survey. Finally, participants will be asked about their use of the credits, and the resulting food on a weekly basis.

You’ll notice dotted blocks (where there should be Thrivemarket.com rewards). Once you get an IRB review, Thrivemarket.com will issue the grocery credits into the system, and your study will be ready to go live.

You may download data from ProofPilot in a CSV format. This data will include all the survey and task-related information in your study. Also, it will include the promo code presented to the participant. If you would like (and included it as part of your analysis), may also request purchase order history associated with this code by e-mailing crew@proofpilot.com.

While the data in this study may be interesting, the primary purpose of studies resulting from this template is operational. Use the lessons and adjust plans for more varied food as medicine and food security studies.

What's included in Online Grocery Ordering Feasibility Demonstration?

There are various measurements, interventions, decision rule tasks in studies.For more detail on what this study includes, along with links for more information on each task scroll down.